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Ok, finally it has gotten to me that I'm wasting a lot of time with solving computercrashes in Windows 98...

This is the standard scenario for a standard day: Everything works fine, I've Winamp, Netscape, DreamWeaver, ICQ and sometimes IE and iMesh running. Suddenly I get errors while browsing or uploading a site: Netscape reports that the network may be down or unreachable. In some cases this error happens every time I click a hyperlink or try to connect to a server, which means that I'll have to reboot Windows in order to get things working again. Then Winamp stops playing and doesn't react.
From this moment things happen too fast to describe in detail (would be a very long story) but in short every program fails somehow. I get error that some programs have made an illegal exectution and will be ended. Blue screens aren't rare either. It ends most of the time that Explored is ended, which means that Windows killed itself.
Sometimes if I'm very lucky I can shutdown properly, but even when I reach the Wait Screen Windows crashes most of the time.

I've made a short list of failures:

Since the 7th of August till yesterday, the 16th, I've had five crashes and four times I succesfully rebooted Windows after major memory leaks ("there's not enough memory to run this program, try shutting down some programs")

I'm willing to describe those crashes in detail, but I'll keep it short for now.

I've heard that Windows 2000 is far more stable than Windows 98 so I thought that I could try it. Would this be a good choice? I hardly play games, so that wouldn't be a problem. My system has the following configuration:

I'd like to get some tips and/or advise whether I can/should install Windows 2000 on my PC, and how I can combine this with Linux that's on an other HD. I've heard that you can use the Windows 2000 bootmanager to boot Linux, is this true?

I would definitely recommend installing Windows 2000 - your system can cope with it, although it would perform slightly better with 128Mb RAM, but it should be OK with 64.

I leave my PC running without a reboot for weeks, and I don't get problems with memory leaks. Right now, my PC has been on for just over a week and I have had zIRC, Eudora, multiple IE windows, WS FTP, ICQ, and MS InterDev open for most of the week.

I can't remember the last crash I had on Windows 2000.
However, before you install it, you should go and download the Windows 2000 Readiness Analyzer from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/r...eleaseID=17304 which should tell you if all your hardware would still work on Win2k.

Increasing your memory will solve a lot of your problems in Windows. With the bare minimum recommended memory your pushing it. I'd also like to see your swap file settings because if you have space available on your hard drive you should never run out of memory.

You also need to figure out which program is causing the memory leak and eliminate it. My guess is that it is either Winamp, iMesh or Dreamweaver, most likely Winamp. Winamp is one of the worst designed programs available commercially and some of its competition is way better. Winamp is like AOL (in fact its owned by AOL) in that people got comfortable with it and continue to use it even though better programs are available.

I don't use any of these programs and have up to 30 applications running at a time on a similar machine with 128 megs of memory, including Visual Basic and Visual C++.

That same memory leak is what is causing your programs to start crashing. Finding and eliminating the problem will be a significant help. If one of these programs are causing the problem, upgrading will not benefit you because they are all 32-bit programs and the same problems will migrate to NT 2000.

Well, I've got to format the whole HD, remove the partitions and start from scratch since I'm using only 4 GB of the 10.2GB... It seems like FDisk has done something wrong while creating the Primary partition. So maybe if I do that, things will look better, but I'm not sure yet. I've formatted my HD already three times and reinstalled everything, but I've never really had a stable system (or is that just called Windows 98?).

Anyway, Windows 2000 seems still quite attractive to me.

BTW Winamp never crashed before I formatted and reinstalled the last time. It used to be the only program that never crashed and it even played on while Windows was dying.

I'm going to upgrade my RAM to 186megs sometime soon. 64megs RAM was enough in the beginning, but now with the Cable connection and all the progs I run it is not enough anymore.

Maybe I will upgrade to WinME sometime soon, but if my sys stays running good I'm happy with my Win98.

My problems with the Windows now is that it crashes after 8 to 15 hours of using. Always the same. Big white dialogue with the 'Program has to be closed' than it comes up till all programs are closed. Than I reboot and that's it. That was the 'crash'. It doesn't matter what those programs are but most likely ICQ or a graphic program.

I will uninstall WinAmp immidiately and start running Sonique again.

Actually ICQ crashes often too and it is owned by AOL too. Conspiracy against MS?

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Well, I've got to format the whole HD, remove the partitions and start from scratch since I'm using only 4 GB of the 10.2GB... It seems like FDisk has done something wrong while creating the Primary partition. So maybe if I do that, things will look better, but I'm not sure yet. I've formatted my HD already three times and reinstalled everything, but I've never really had a stable system (or is that just called Windows 98?).
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Are you using FAT32, LBA and PIO mode 4 on your disk? Are you accessing it properly. It sounds to me like your reading the drive wrong which could be the source of all your problems.

To check Enter the BIOS setup utility. On Option 1. Go to your hard drives and make sure that all four drives are set to AUTO for both the Type (Type 1, Type 2, Type 47, etc.) and Access Mode (Normal, LBA, etc.). You should have a total of 8 AUTOS on the screen before your done. If it says AUTO in the correct 8 spaces your set. If not then backup your important data before making these changes because your going to lose it otherwise.

If all are set to Auto and you want to use the remainder of your drive without reformatting.
1. Reboot your PC from a Windows 98 Bootdisk
2. Enter FDISK
3. Type "y" at the prompt for large disk support.
4. Set up an Secondary partition.
5. Select "Y" to everything.
6. Close and reboot into DOS again.
7. at the prompt type FDISK /MBR and reboot.
8. In Windows Format the new D: Drive.

Setup should only take 20-30 minutes.
After you reboot and Windows is detecting plug and play hardware. Answer "NO" when it says "Windows has finished setting up your Hardware do you wish to Reboot Now" until after you know that every piece of Plug N Play hardware has been installed. After this second Reboot your ready to rock and roll.
An added benefit of installing off the harddrive like this is everytime Windows needs to install a new driver for new equipment or you need a codec or network protocol, its right there. Windows won't ask for the CD-ROM.

Seems like a lot of work but you can be finished in 45 minutes to an hour.

to deal with your hard drive I recommend Patrition Magic ... so you won't have to format your hard drive(most of the times) ... and it's a lot easier than fdisk ...

about Win 2000 & win 98 ... on my Laptop(wich has 128mb of ram) I recently installed win 2000 Advanced Server(because it's the only one I had ) , and I never had any crashes ...yet ... and I like it very much and it seems much faster then 98 ... but when I need to shutdown/reboot my 2000 I need to remove my network card or else it will freeze

Also on my laptop I have Win ME ... and I hate it ... because I have touchpad , and it won't configure right , like it did in 98 ... I almost never use ME , except of times when I need to capture videos (because 2000 somehow doesn't support my capture device)

ok ... on my desktop computer (which has 192 mb of ram) I have win 98 , I couldn't install 2000 over there , because one program won't work over on 2000 ... but 98 is very stable ... I don't have many crashes ... besides the times , when it just reboots by itself